The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a U.S. federally chartered nonprofit characterized by John Kiriakou as a propaganda proxy for the Central Intelligence Agency. “The National Endowment for Democracy has taken many millions of dollars from the CIA to promote American propaganda — mainstream American government propaganda. So when it talks about things like nation-building, it’s not really talking about nation-building. It’s talking about encouraging the development of leaders in foreign countries that are going to be knee-jerk supporters of the U.S. and U.S. foreign policy.”[1]
Operational character
Kiriakou is explicit that NED is not an operational or paramilitary entity: “It’s mainly a propaganda sort of machine for lack of better term. It’s not actual boots on the ground type operations.” The closest analogue in his framing is the use of the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee as ostensibly party-political instruments through which the same cultivation work proceeds in foreign settings, as he observed personally in Kuwait following the 1991 liberation (see Kuwait Liberation Day and John Rendon).[2][3]